Living Toward Primary Pleasures

Everywhere I look, life has become easy. Food appears at the tap of a screen. Water flows endlessly from the wall. Houses shelter us from cold and heat. The world of effort has been replaced by convenience—and convenience, though gentle, has hollowed us out.

I feel it in myself, and in the children who share this house with me: the system rewards compliance, not vitality. It trains us to obey, to stay still, to scroll. Distraction has become the dominant rhythm of being. It’s efficient, it’s comfortable—and it’s death by ease.

That phrase sounds both terrible and peaceful. Death by ease. It’s simple, seductive. What do you mean I don’t have to do anything? That sounds great—sign me up. Why would I possibly want anything else? What could be better than sitting at home while the world comes to me?

Ease seduces because it mimics safety. It promises rest without exertion, satiation without hunger, stability without risk. It whispers that survival is enough. But survival is the floor, not the shape of a life.

Turning back toward effort The question is not how to escape the easy world, but how to live inside it without losing aliveness. For me, it begins with simple acts: preparing food by hand—cutting, cooking, cleaning—feeling the heat, the smell, the transformation of raw matter into nourishment. Stepping outside and orienting to the season—the temperature, the scent of air, the sound of leaves. Moving the body not for fitness but for rhythm. Breathing without mediation. These are small re-entries into contact with the real.

Why do hard things? Hard things aren’t moral badges. They’re the friction through which the body remembers its own capacities. Doing what is difficult makes experience dense; it wakes the senses that ease dulls. The gain is not pride, but perception. The world becomes textured again.

Ease breeds contentment without depth. It erases necessity and, with it, orientation. When effort disappears, meaning thins. Hardness—real engagement with resistance—rebuilds orientation. It teaches: this costs me something, therefore it matters.

Worry doesn’t serve that process. Worry consumes energy without structure. Effort, by contrast, shapes energy into form: a meal, a repaired hinge, a conversation that alters the air between two people. Ease is static; effort is generative. The goal is not strain for its own sake, but contact—just enough resistance to keep the soul awake inside the body.

Deepening the practice If resistance keeps the soul awake, then I must learn to turn down ease gently, to increase contact and deepen the senses. Small choices accumulate: walking instead of scrolling, mending instead of replacing, pausing before speaking. Each is a quiet act of reclamation, a way of remembering that living well requires participation, not consumption.

Context and collapse My mind drifts to the larger field—the crumbling systems, the billions of lives inside them. Eight billion human souls, each facing the same tension between ease and effort. Are we collectively ready to stay awake? Or are we content to drift deeper into the anesthesia of abundance, letting a few decide the fate of the many? Perhaps the end won’t come to my lifetime, but with it.

Still, collapse isn’t the whole story. The other story is the daily act of returning—turning back toward what’s real while the world transforms. Cooking, repairing, tending, speaking truthfully, resting fully. These are the quiet forms of continuity that no system can automate.

How to model this for the children Not by demanding it. Not by moralizing it. By living it. By letting them see cause and consequence unfold naturally. By refusing to outsource what can be done by hand. By protecting silence. If I cook, walk, repair, and rest in presence, they will see what it means to inhabit a human life.

Practice Prepare food from raw materials. Touch what you use. Speak with one person without a goal. Repair one thing each day. Let silence stand.

Every act of effort rebuilds a small territory of truth inside a collapsing system. This is how to live—closer to need, closer to being, closer to the world that still wants us alive.